It's important for such stories to be reported, but the ensuing freakout is sort-of mystifying. Here's the thing: Amazon is a retailer; Hachette is a supplier to Amazon; retailers play hardball with their suppliers all the time; why?; because it's their job. In fact, businesses play hardball with suppliers all the time.

Some further points.

1. Amazon is not a monopoly.

In the wake of this, people are throwing around the word "monopoly" to describe Amazon. As the Times story itself says, Amazon has 30% of the book retailing market. 30%. If 30% marketshare makes you a monopoly, words have no meaning. It's that simple. In related news, my living room is a ranch on Mars.

2. The people who have reason to be pissed are not writers, but consumers.

The reason we think monopolies are (or can be) bad is because monopolies can extract rent from consumers. The reason why the economy exists is so that actual people--in economic language, consumers--can have stuff, preferably cheaply and conveniently.

The Times reveals more about its biases and its audience when it makes the whole story about how writers are the real victims. "Writers Feel An Amazon-Hachette Spat," shouts the headline. Do they? Consumers do, if their books take longer to ship. But do writers actually feel it? The story doesn't really say.

In a wonderful bit of World-From-9th-Avenue-ism, the story is peppered with references on how Amazon's move makes it harder to buy books by Malcolm Gladwell, as if Gladwell was the most important or best-selling Hachette author (probably to the Times' audience he is).

3. The way this plays out shows publishers have plenty of power in the Amazon-publisher relationship.

If you're a juice drink company and Wal-mart wants to extract better terms from you, they're not going (or not just going) to make your drinks harder to find on the shelf. At some point, they will just take them off the shelf completely. And at that point, you're utterly screwed. That's how retailer-supplier relationships usually work.

But Amazon can't take Hachette's works off its virtual shelves. The reason we know this is because Amazon actually tried to pull a major publisher's books off its website over an ebooks pricing dispute, and had to back down (in humiliation) in less than a day.

Let's go back to our Wal-mart example. If instead of being a random fruit-juice company, you are Coca-Cola, Wal-mart can't pressure you by taking your products off its shelves, because Wal-mart can't afford not to sell Coke. If they don't, shoppers will just go elsewhere, and Wal-mart will end up hurting itself more than you. The other reason Wal-mart isn't going to pull Coke off its shelves is because Coke is a huge company with countless distribution channels and even Wal-mart pulling Coke would only marginally affect Coca-Cola's bottom line. There are still going to be tense negotiations, but the power balance is going to look very different.

This is what's going on with Hachette and Amazon. The very fact that Amazon is resorting to these comparatively small-ball tactics (suggesting other books, delaying shipping) is really a show of weakness. Because both Hachette and Amazon know that Amazon can't afford to pull Hachette from its shelves. If anybody has a monopoly on this situation, it's Hachette. To go back to the Times' example, Hachette has 100% of the marketshare on publishing Malcolm Gladwell books (if Hachette is Gladwell's only publisher, which I don't know, but you get the point). Hachette literally has a monopoly on the books it publishes. This isn't just semantics: this is the whole point of marketing. The whole point of creating a brand--and Malcolm Gladwell is nothing if not a brand--is to differentiate your product from competitors, ideally by turning it into a category unto itself, so that you effectively have a monopoly on it. And this is why brand effects lead to high margins. Wal-mart can't replace Coke with Generic Cola, because to consumers Coke is not the same as Generic Cola. Coke has a monopoly on Coke. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smartphones but it does have a monopoly on iPhones, and if you ask consumers, plenty of them will tell you an iPhone is a different thing from a generic smartphone. We don't speak of these monopolies in these terms because it's confusing, and because those kinds of monopolies are not economically harmful the way marketshare monopolies are, but fundamentally it's the same idea, and it's important to keep this in mind.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Hachette is the "bad guy" in this story (note: in the vast majority of business stories there is no "good guy" or "bad guy"), or that Amazon should fear Hachette more than Hachette should fear Amazon. Amazon is a very powerful and very audacious company that is clearly going after the publishers on several fronts.

But the point is that a hardball fight between a retailer and a supplier is the oldest news in the world, that Hachette, a global multibillion dollar conglomerate, is hardly a helpless flower, and that this is how our economy functions.

I'm a writer and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. I most recently worked as an analyst, and before that at Business Insider, where I co-created BI Intelligence, the company's market research service. I live in Paris with my beloved wife and daughter.